Anthem was the first of Ayn Rand’s books to be published and is also the first that I have now read. Its written as a dystopian novella meant to critique the communist and socialist movements which were in place in Europe during the 1930's and the story will sound quite familiar. A totalitarian state has erased past history, has replaced all individual names with numbers (the narrator's ‘name' being Equality 7-2521), work is ordered rather than chosen, romantic relationships are replaced with forced mating, reading is unheard of and all challenges to the established collective result in severe punishment. Pretty close to Orwell’s 1984, as well as numerous other science fiction stories.

One spin though with Anthem is that no one has a sense of “I”. Instead, each person is known as a “we” in order to reflect constant identification with the collective. “I” did not wake up to go to work this morning. “We” woke up to go to work this morning. The whole concept of "I" is non-existent. This at first made the book a bit difficult as it is written in the form of secret journal. And I can understand why versions of this story didn’t include this aspect because it does disrupt the reading a bit. But it did help instill while reading the alternate mindset of the characters and the subsequent transformation of the narrator to an “I”. Should note that mirrors are also not allowed.

How the story proceeds should be fairly obvious, as you are aware from the first page that the journal was being written in secret, and there aren’t really any surprises as the narrative develops. But it was still an interesting book as it is one of the first of its kind and I find it impressive that it was published back in 1936 prior to World War II. However, after doing some research, looks like one other novel proceeded Anthem. Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a book called We in 1921 and was in response to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. I would assume that are a number of books that then also influenced Zamyatin's.